The letter was dated in New York, from an hotel. Roger felt a certain dismay. It had been from the first a peculiar satisfaction to him that Nora began and ended so distinctly with herself. But here was a hint of indefinite continuity! Here, at last, was an echo of her past. He immediately showed the letter to Nora. As she read it, her face flushed deep with wonder and suppressed relief. She had never heard, she confessed, of her mother’s half-sister. The “great affection” between the two ladies must have been anterior to Mrs. Lambert’s marriage. Roger’s own provisional solution of the problem was that Mrs. Lambert had married so little to the taste of her family as to forfeit all communication with them. If he had obeyed his first impulse, he would have written to his mysterious petitioner that Miss Lambert was sensible of the honor implied in his request, but that never having missed his attentions, it seemed needless that, at this time of day, she should cultivate them. But Nora was interested in Mr. Fenton; the dormant pulse of kinship had been quickened; it began to throb with delicious power. This was enough for Roger. “I don’t know,” he said, “whether he’s an honest man or a scamp, but at a venture I suppose I must invite him down.” To this Nora replied that she thought his letter was “so beautiful”; and Mr. Fenton received a fairly civil summons. Whether or no he was an honest man remained to be seen; but on the face of the matter he appeared no scamp. He was, in fact, a person difficult to classify. Roger had made up his mind that he would be outrageously rough and Western; full of strange oaths and bearded, for aught he knew, like the pard. In aspect, however, Fenton was a pretty fellow enough, and his speech, if not especially conciliatory to ears polite, possessed a certain homely vigor in which ears polite might have found their account. He was as little as possible, certainly, of Roger’s circle; but he carried about him the native fragrance of another circle, beside which the social perfume familiar to Roger’s nostrils might have seemed a trifle stale and insipid. He was invested with a loose-fitting cosmopolitan Occidentalism, which seemed to say to Roger that, of the two, he was the provincial. Considering his years,—they numbered but twenty-five,—Fenton’s tough maturity was very wonderful. You would have confessed, however, that he had a true genius for his part, and that it became him better to play at manhood than at juvenility. He could never have been a ruddy-checked boy. He was tall and lean, with a keen dark eye, a smile humorous, but not exactly genial, a thin, drawling, almost feminine voice, and a strange Southwestern accent. His voice, at first, might have given you certain presumptuous hopes as to a soft spot in his stiff young hide; but after listening awhile to its colorless monotone, you would have felt, I think, that though it was